15.08.07

01.08.07

18.02.18

Man&Eve Projects is pleased to be participating in The Manchester Contemporary 24 – 27 September 2015, with a solo presentation of work by Pippa Gatty.

Central to Gatty’s work is a belief in the power of artistic labour and activity to generate a phantasm. Accordingly, her practise becomes a device for shifting time and space, either infiltrating a pre-existing archive or building her own register in which to find a zone where memory and narrative can be created and altered.

Gatty uses her medium as a way to understand and navigate through her archival material. Her investigations, her absorption in the process, and the theatre and mechanisms of making work, create a liminal space between the imaginary and real, the known and the unknown, in which the acts of pretending and believing are addressed.

This new body of work contributes to Gatty’s wider personal archive of explorations, as well as reflecting the landscape that surrounds her home and her studio on the Isle of Mull. Drawing on a rich history of the sublime and a nostalgia for the golden age of romantic landscape, the paintings suggest an environmental foreboding, and a grief for both lost innocence and a vanished world or landscape. They are meditations on the human condition, our place within a changing world and cosmos, and the metaphysical possibilities available within this. There is an emotional connection to historical painting, a longstanding dialogue with the bucolic, and a sense of mourning for that which is lost.

The surface of each painting is heavily worked, having been painted and repainted repeatedly over a number of months, before the final image reveals itself. The finished works represent both a series of melancholic excavations into a lost past and meditations on potential future worlds.